By Srishti Prabha
Jamie Pesquiza Cardenas doesn’t just identify as an artist. They call themselves a cultural worker. “My focus is really excavating and investigating my cultural identity as an Ilocano and a Filipinx person,” Cardenas says. “I’m just piecing everything together.”
That piecing together began in their youth, as they probed through their mother’s boxes of old film photos, searching for answers about their Ilocano family history and tracing back their ancestry to northwestern Luzon in the Philippines.
“[My mom] wouldn’t really explain our family history,” Cardenas recalls. “So film photography was my entry point into art — it told the stories of my ancestors that they were too afraid to tell.”
In one shot, Cardenas’ mother takes a Polaroid picture of her grandmother’s side of the family in Hawaii. This was how Cardenas learned of her family’s migration from the Philippines to Hawaii, and eventually Sacramento. “They were called sakadas — Ilocanos who were farm laborers in the pineapple and sugarcane fields,” they explain.
Cardenas honors her mother’s work in her film practice, capturing their Filipinx community. They tagged their early work with the phrase “film tells the truth,” a mantra that still frames their approach.
What began with film photography grew into a practice that now spans disciplines, stretches across time and reaches back toward their roots. From indigo dyeing to, more recently, weaving and quilting, the heart of Cardenas’ work fixates on ancestral reclamation, Filipino culture and healing. They draw from Ilokano traditions and natural materials, using each medium to process chronic illness and stitch the intangible into something tactile.
Growing up in South Sacramento, Cardenas always had a camera in hand. They didn’t rely on a formal education to pursue the arts, rather it was something that came from within. “I think the artist is the inner child that still wants to live,” Cardenas explains. But claiming the identity of “artist” was a fight — one shaped by race, gender and immigrant expectations.
“Because I’m Filipino American, it was a big no-no,” they said. “Even though I felt very lost, [art] made sense to me.”
Their journey transformed during the pandemic, when a chance encounter with an Ilokano elder introduced them to weaving. Until then, Cardenas had never considered weaving to be part of their inheritance, even though their grandmother’s textiles, known as inabel, were all around them.
“When I told my family I was apprenticing, they said, ‘Oh, both of your grandmothers were weavers,’” Cardenas says. “I was 37 and I’d lived my whole life not knowing that.”
Weaving was continuity passed through looms, hidden in folds. “When I’m sitting at the loom and weaving, I think about them,” Cardenas says. “And I look at my hands and I see my grandmother’s hands — that’s really powerful.”
They weave with intention and remembrance, acknowledging the belief in “some Indigenous traditions that drop lines in weaving are how the ancestors get in,” they say. “So I leave them in. I need the help.”
Cardenas’s signature motif is kusikos, which translates to “whirlpool,” a dizzying geometric pattern once believed to ward off malevolent spirits and protect sailors at sea. The motif, with its spiraling form, mirrors Cardenas’s own navigation through identity, illness and legacy. “I focus on kusikos because my experience as a femme-identifying person has been very dizzying,” they say. “The pattern reflects how I feel: spinning, trying to figure it out.”
The short and long lines of black and white thread meticulously stretch over their loom, forming optical illusions as the cloth gets longer. Cardenas says they use their whole body in the process — hand, brain, heart and feet.
“Weaving is insane because it is taking one string at a time, laying it side by side through a process called warping,” they explain. “It’s binary code that you have to program one by one … and then based on the pattern and how you’re treadling, which is the foot pedals, that determines the actual design.”
Before they found the loom, Cardenas immersed themself in tayum, an indigo dye used in Ilokano weaving. During the lockdown, surrounded by grief and rising death tolls, they turned to the earth. “A good friend told me, ‘You know we have our own natural dye practices,’ and it clicked,” they say. “The national natural dye capital of the Philippines is where my ancestors are from. I realized: This is literally what they used to do.”
They learned to extract pigment from the plant themself, tending to them in large vats. Their textiles are a rich color of blue with various techniques employed to get large circles or rectangles along the cloth. Soft in hand, the fabrics are then used to make quilts, clothes, or to be used for later projects.
Cardenas’s latest project, “Threads of Belonging,” is a community-based fiber arts mural created with fellow artists Pachia Lucy Vang and Ren Allathkani, showcasing Hmong, Palestinian and Filipino motifs.
“It’s a response to how cultural art gets co-opted or sidelined,” they say. “We want Sacramento to see: This is what our city looks like.”
The 30-foot mural will live at the Valley High School Library, where Cardenas once walked the halls. “I take little sips of that realization,” they say. “It feels so big and so heart-expanding to me because of my struggle growing up as an artist in South Sacramento.”
They’re also collaborating with Filipinx choreographer Sammay Peñaflor Dizon to create costumes for a dance piece titled “The Way Home is an Upward Spiral,” and continuing their work at a new studio downtown, where they plan to host grief circles, workshops and healing spaces for Asian Americans.
Through their art, Cardenas also explores how living with endometriosis — a chronic, often disabling condition — has profoundly shaped their creative choices. Pain, once something endured, becomes a collaborator, pushing the pace of Cardenas’ work. “Pain takes you to the very edges of yourself,” they say. “To have my art, to have a way to feel through my body where it’s not just pain. It’s not just confusion.”
Cardenas finds that art is never solitary. It’s embedded in community, in ceremony, in survival. “As immigrants and artists in Sacramento, we’ve been displaced,” they say. “Finding a place of our own — it’s a full-circle moment.”